News from CineVue

★★★☆☆ There's often an unfortunate tug-of-war going on beneath the surface of films made primarily with a social agenda in mind and by those who care deeply about the subject. Taking 2013's No Fixed Abode as an example, its cause - highlighting issues surrounding homelessness - was an admirable one, but poor execution and fundamental narrative shortcomings hampered its impact. Indeed, Oren Moverman's Richard Gere-starring Time Out of Mind (2014) was far more successful in its comparable insights. By that token, I Used to Live Here (2015), a film produced by a community affected by teenage suicides, could have suffered from similar problems. Such concerns were unfounded.

★★☆☆☆ Take care to not place too much hope into the misery-inducing yet somehow star-studded caper Kidnapping Freddy Heineken (2015). It's a head-scratcher of a flick if only for the fact that viewers will spend the duration of the film wondering what precisely caused Anthony Hopkins to sign on as the titular character. Based on actual events, this incarnation gives way to a shoddy production rather than quality storytelling. There's wasted potential here, but is there any saving grace? It's 1982 in Amsterdam. A group of best friends - also business partners - find themselves at the end of their rope. Their finances have been drained on their start-up company in light of a recession.

★★★☆☆ The central victory of Ron Mann's fond portrait of the maverick American filmmaker Robert Altman is how personal he manages to make it. For a documentary about a director with such a strong authorial voice, it seems only fitting that Altman (2014) is largely narrated by the man himself through various interviews and recordings. In concert with these are words from his widow, Kathryn, and two sons, Robert and Stephen, who worked with their father for years. They're laid over a wealth of archival material - from film clips, to home videos and public appearances - that paint a unique and insightful picture of a fascinating man and career.

★★★★☆ Upon its initial release in 1932, Raymond Bernard's early-sound war film, Wooden Crosses was hailed as one of the masterpieces of cinema. Since then, it has largely been overlooked in wider discussion of the genre which is a shame, and hopefully something that a new blu-ray release as part of Eureka's continually interesting Masters of Cinema Collection can help to rectify. Often overshadowed by All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) it is a film equally committed to channelling the horror of the trenches during the First World War making use of a variety of visual techniques to imbue its humane but simple narrative with deeper poetry.

★★★☆☆ Even as far as Nazis go, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a monumentally unattractive person. With his pencil neck, his weak watery eyes, his Touché Turtle expression of prissy blandness, a less convincing example of Hitler's theories of racial superiority would be difficult to find. That this apparently feeble specimen could wreak such obscene and widespread damage, causing the death of millions of people is a staggering fact. The question for the documentarian might not be how do we understand such a thing, but is there anything there really to understand? Vanessa Lapa's documentary The Decent One (2014) exploits a wealth of documentation to reconstruct Himmler’s private life from the inside out.

★★★★★Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) begins with a dazzling but hellish vision of a megalopolis shrouded in smog so thick that the sun has disappeared from the sky. Is it day or is it night? Giant towers of industry belch fire and pyramid-like structures sit like thrones over an urban landscape of monstrous magnitude. It is a seminal moment for modern sci-fi cinema because nothing so majestically awful had ever been committed to the screen. Here is a depiction of urban planning not as an outlandish cinematic imagining, but closer to a devastating environmental prophecy of things to come if we don't get our act together. It has been said that Los Angeles is a city in search of a centre.

★★★☆☆ John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), reissued this week for 50th anniversary celebrations, is at once a time capsule peice and an oddly prescient fable about vacuous, ephemeral celebrity which remains tartly relevant in 2015. It is perhaps best remembered as the film that crowned the imperial phase of Julie Christie's career with an Oscar, part of a golden run encompassing Billy Liar (1963), Doctor Zhivagho (1967) and Don't Look Now (1973), and lasted right up until Shampoo and Nashville (1975). In retrospect, it's difficult to fathom why the award came for her portrayal of the one-note Diana Scott in this slightly confused film rather than for her spectacular performance in, say, The Go-Between (1971).

★★★☆☆ Christopher Nolan continues to demand viewers to stretch their minds as well as their attention spans in his recent addition to an already impressive oeuvre with Interstellar (2014). It is a film that poses to its viewers the simple question, "how do you survive in a world that demands your eradication?" What appears as a deceptively simple quest into space soon quickly evolves into a meditation on the consequences of survival as well as the limits of love. This scientifically-driven drama is dense, sometimes derivative but never dull. Like Inception (2010), Nolan continues to experiment with the cinematic intersection of crises of faith and high-concept visual pleasure.

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